Temple Grandin on Meat Plant Fragility, Cytokine Storms, and How Autistic Minds Think

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast. Okay, Temple Grandin, welcome to the podcast.

Temple Grandin [00:00:12] Great to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] So it is Coronavirus 2020, I think it's, what is it? May 8th.

Temple Grandin [00:00:20] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:00:20] Where are you at right now? Dr. Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin [00:00:23] I'm at home and on March 12th I did my last flight on March 13th they closed my university just like all the other universities got closed and I haven't traveled since.

Vance Crowe [00:00:35] So for people that are not familiar with you, you do animal science and specifically you work a lot with the meat packing world. But why don't you give a little rundown about your background, who you are and why you travel all over the world to, to talk to people about animals.

Temple Grandin [00:00:51] Do a little rundown. Well, when I was a little kid I had no speech. Severely autistic little kid. And I was always good at building things when I was in high school and a world revolved around horses. And then I went out to Arizona State University and I got my master's in animal science and I started working with the cattle feed yards. I can tell you in the 1970s, being a woman in a man's industry, that was not easy. And I had to make myself really good at what I did. And I started designing cattle handling facilities. In fact, it was an HBO movie made about me and I loved the fact that they showed all my jobs. So designing facilities and then I gradually, you know, build up that business. I've designed a piece of equipment called the Center Track Restrainer System that is in all of the large beef plants have got it. So equipment, working in behavior. And then I started being asked to do more and more talks about autism. You know, there's a autism goes from Einstein and half of Silicon Valley programmers, like the fancy mic you've got, the autistic brain probably invented that to somebody who can't dress themselves. So I've been doing a lot of talks and what I call my different kinds of minds talk where I talk about visual thinking, math thinking, and verbal thinking. And so I've now, in my early seventies, so what I've been doing lately is speaking engagements. But back in the eighties and the early nineties, I was living out in the plants supervising construction projects, supervising the construction of things I had designed.

Temple Grandin [00:02:25] I also worked with McDonald's corporation on animal welfare auditing and developed a really simple scoring system for evaluating meat plants. I did that in 1999 in the world in the year 2000 around in there. So I've been doing a lot of different things and I, I was traveling all around working on animal behavior and building things. Now recently I was traveling around the universities doing talks to motivate the kids that think differently to get out and be successful. And then all of a sudden all of this was canceled on March the 13th.

Vance Crowe [00:03:03] You and I have had a chance to meet a couple of different times and the last time was at Mami, the North American Meat Institute conference.

Temple Grandin [00:03:10] Oh, okay. That's right.

Vance Crowe [00:03:11] And we had a fantastic lunch because we had a conversation about what it is to think visually. Okay. And I think that I think in pictures in many ways and, and my ability to speak about what I see in those pictures has given me a great advantage. But I think you have done a, a great job of explaining how different people see the world differently and why they can see things and shape things differently in their mind. How do you describe this to people that don't necessarily have this ability?

Temple Grandin [00:03:41] Well, one of the things the HBO movie Temple Grandin did really well is it showed exactly how I think. And there was one scene in there where they said shoes and all these old 1950s and sixties shoes started popping up. It, it's, or I can be thinking about horses and now I'm seeing different horses. Some I saw yesterday a horse I rode in high school. It's specific. Specific examples make concepts like when I design equipment I can, I can see it when I, when I was doing the drawings, I can see the steel work, see the concrete work on nothing's abstract. Verbal thinkers. Things tend to be much, much more abstract. They'll say to me, oh, teachers say all them, what do I do with autistic kids in the classroom? Like, I don't know how old are they? Am I dealing with a 3-year-old? I get a very different picture. I'm now seeing a little nursery school that's next door to where I live and or I'm a a an elementary school kid, a high school kid. I need to know a few things before I can answer that.

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] And then a, a child that's gotten older that's autistic, is it that they have more concrete pictures through which they can grab ideas and be able to place them into their imagination? Like what, why is there such a large difference between the autistic child that's in nursery school up to high school?

Temple Grandin [00:05:02] Well, these ability, some abilities and things like visual thinking and math usually don't show up in nursery school. But a person with autism is in the details, specific things. I'm a picture thinker that's actually called an object visualizer scientifically. Another kind of thinker you can have in autism is the mathematical visual spatial thinker that's half a silicon valley. Half a silicon valley is probably on the autism spectrum. And then you've got people that are in the words love history often absolutely love history, love facts, they love sports statistics and things like this. So there's like three kind of specific kinds of thinking. In fact, I talk about those thinking in my book, the Autistic Brain. 'cause you might just say, well that's just a bunch of, you know, that's not even true. Well yes it is true. There's science to show you can have an object visualizer. They tend to go into arts. Another thing they go into is the skilled traits. Fixing cars, designing things, building things. Then the more mathematical thinkers, they're the computer scientists. They bring all the electronics that we're talking on. And then you've got word thinkers. But what happens is if you add circuits to do some of this other kind of thinking, you take out some social circuits, socialization eats up a pile of processor space, just a big pile. And, and a brain can either be more thinking or a brain can be more social emotional. Now a certain amount of this is just normal variation. When do you slap a label on it?

Temple Grandin [00:06:34] Because one of the questions I ask educators and I put up a picture of Michelangelo and I'll say he was a sixth grade dropout. His dad hated art, wanting him to do business documents. Well where would he end up today when they've taken art class out of the schools? I think one of the worst things the schools have done is taken all the hands-on classes out. Okay, what about stuff online? Lectures work fine. Computer science, statistics, classworks fine online, but I just talked to our veterinary students yesterday and calving class online. You're not gonna learn to calf cows online.

Vance Crowe [00:07:12] So that we have just entered a very interesting period in our world's history, which is because of coronavirus, people have to be distant. And now you're going to take what was the learning environment where you were in person with people, you were actually in your case teaching them about how to stand next to animals or how to cast That's

Temple Grandin [00:07:31] Right. How to move them. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:07:32] How to physically be there. And now that's not happening. So how do you think Coronavirus is impacting people's ability to learn right now? Both autistic and just, just normies like me?

Temple Grandin [00:07:42] I think it affects different majors differently. Okay. The computer people invented the stuff we're talking on right now. They computers, programming, math, that stuff works fine online. But the computer people need to be careful because what works well for them, it's not gonna work well for, for a theater class, let's say. Well, you know, you're putting on a play. We have a fashion design department. It's, unless you've got a fancy sewing machine, you're not gonna do that at home or VE or surgery for veterinarians. How are you gonna do car mechanics online? Yes, there's things you can learn, but it's a point where you've got to actually take the car apart and actually do it. And I'm very concerned, we have a gigantic shortage right now of high end skilled traits and we're losing skills 'cause we took it out of the schools 25 years ago. Okay, let's look at these big food factories. I've worked with every major meat company and it's very interesting how the engineering is done in these plants and they're all the same. The visual thinkers like me lay out the whole entire plant. You know, we get given the title of draft draft person, but we do a lot more than that. Lay out the whole entire plant. Also the visual thinkers make the very clever equipment like a super clever packaging machine that's made by the visual thinkers. So what are the mathematicians do? Boilers, refrigeration, roof trusses, water power. What's happened now when new processing plants have been put in, all of the clever engineering stuff is coming from Europe because they've kept still traits. Like a new poultry processing plant just was built last year.

Temple Grandin [00:09:16] A hundred shipping containers of stuff from Europe. Beautiful equipment. Each shipping container is equal to one semi-truck load because they still kept their skilled trays. And these kind of skills aren't, you're not gonna do this stuff online. You see that this,

Vance Crowe [00:09:32] And it strikes me as once the skill is not here, it's very difficult to reshore it into the United States. So people that are learning how to do it have to learn from people that know how to do it and and to be able to propagate it out and teach more people.

Temple Grandin [00:09:46] I didn't realize how bad this was until about three years ago we were teaching a class at one of the great big pork plants and I was looking at all the equipment in there and I got a tour of the whole of two of these gigantic plants and the stuff was all imported. But then I go, okay, the building, the refrigeration, that stuff we made the things more mathematical stuff, but all is super clever conveyors. Then I went to a big tech company, I can't tell you where I went. Super fancy tech factory I went to last year signed a non-disclosure. I can't tell you what it, where it is or what it does, but it had a lot of conveyors in there to move stuff around. The fact in the factory, those came from Germany. And I'm going, we've got some serious problems here. And this is the stuff online learning, yeah, you can learn certain things online, but there's a point where you're gonna have to work on the car. There's a point where you gotta get out and work on conveyors. Boy, and I've worked on them, I've seen every way conveyors can mess up and you don't learn that until you've actually done it.

Vance Crowe [00:10:45] So let's talk about a real world example about that. Has lots of conveyor belts right now in the United States we have meat packing plants that because of coronavirus have not been able to operate at either any capacity, they've been completely shut down or they're operating at a much reduced capacity, which is starting to create fears about food shortages. How real do you think the food shortages or the meat shortages are going to be? And what, what do you think about the capacity that the, the factories have right now?

Temple Grandin [00:11:15] Well, first of all, why are they getting infected? All right. The, what I've looked at, and I've read a lot of stuff, there seem to be certain places getting infected and they're places where you got lots of people stuffed in close to each other. Cruise ships been really bad. Shared ventilation, aircraft carrier, really bad prisons. I just read about a prison where almost everybody was infected and meat packing plants, especially out in the, in the meat cutup where they're just standing there shoulder to shoulder, got lots of people there together. Now the thing we don't know now, I just read that one of the meat plants is 50% infected. Now will we go to herd immunity? That's, and that will solve a lot of problems relatively quickly. If once you get coronavirus, you stay immune to it for a while. We don't know how long that's gonna last, but it's caused some real problems. And it's

Vance Crowe [00:12:06] Possible, people talk about this term herd immunity, but if you're not actually dealing with animals or herds, it's not really an intuitive idea. It's just kind of like immunity. What is the difference between just immunity and herd immunity?

Temple Grandin [00:12:18] All right, well let's say in the prison for example, and if I was an epi epidemiologist, I'd be going to this prison and begging to test everybody for the antibodies. Okay, if everybody in this prison is now infected guards and inmates, if maybe a new person coming in there would get infected, but the rest of it, if there's herd immunity, it would stop. But you see, we don't know now if that, if that immunity lasts for just a couple of weeks, no it's not gonna work. When I was a child in the fifties, they deliberately exposed kids to measles, mumps and chicken pox. It was done on purpose because those were diseases where immunity would last for pretty much a lifetime. And they, they were much more deadly and bad in adults. And so they, well, you know, you other kid had chicken px, they'd take you over to their house. So you'd get chicken pox. You had to get all these diseases done while you was still in elementary school. Now it's before there were vaccines, I actually experienced that. Well that's herd immunity for, but that's a disease where the immunity last a long time. We don't know how long the immunity that COVID is gonna last. Don't we have no idea. And, and then what was found in the prison and what's been found in the plants too and other places, there's a whole pile of people didn't even know they had it until they test them. So you go all the way from real, real serious disease to terrible disease.

Temple Grandin [00:13:49] And this is just, I read a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:13:52] Yeah. I had interviewed a man named Brad Fracking who is running a pork plant in a couple different places, South Dakota and Missouri. And what he discovered, because they were doing testing on their employees was a thousand people out of a 2000 person had had had the disease. But it turns out 90% of them were completely asymptomatic. And so while they were testing positive, they were looking around at other people saying, I feel perfectly healthy, I feel fine to work.

Temple Grandin [00:14:22] And so

Vance Crowe [00:14:22] We've got these challenges,

Temple Grandin [00:14:23] What we need to be doing now. 'cause I've read some stuff on how much virus you, you get exposed to initially affect verity. Is, is I, if I epidemiology, what I would do is go into that plant and I want to interview all those employees. I wanna do a, a antibody test. Now there's been some problems with the accuracy. Accuracy, but then I'd also wanna do where you no symptoms, we really, you know, medium sick, you know, I'd put 'em like in four rankings and then I'd look that back against the immunity readings and then see how long it lasts. 'cause now I have a population where I know who they are. You know, the same thing with the prison or cruise ship because maybe they just end up with herd immunity and we need to know how many had no symptoms. See this is where a scientist that's in this field needs to get all over that because we need to solve these problems. Another thing we need to do for severe COVID, I'm in the at-risk group, most young people just to get over it. But, and it, but there's a, but especially in older people and a few young people, your immune system goes to fight it off, fight the virus off. But then in some people, and I just read a really good paper on this yesterday with graphs that showed a whole bunch of stuff, your, imagine your body's a military base. I like visual analogies. And so the virus comes in and my immune system goes out and fights it. My soldiers fight it.

Temple Grandin [00:15:54] But then the virus overruns the base. My soldiers are fighting, but then my soldiers just go berserk. And instead of protecting me, they burn start burning down the barracks. That's an auto like an autoimmune reaction. That's what's called the cytokine storm. That's what kills is the cytokine storm. Most people don't get it, so you just tough it out. But the people that get the cytokine storm, other ones end up on respirators and everything else. Now what's needed is an anti-inflammatory medication to treat the cytokine storm to make your troop stand down. Now there's been, oh, I'm not naming any drugs because then people go out and hoard the stop. But basically your principle is an antiviral drug is used early to stop the invasion. And the graph was very, very clear on this. And then then most people, you know, tough it out. But let's say the soldiers start to burn the barracks. An anti-inflammatory drug has to be given when the first barracks is burned. Not when the whole base is in flames because then you're, you're too far gone.

Vance Crowe [00:17:01] So timing is very important. You would have to

Temple Grandin [00:17:03] Timing, I've got four peer reviewed articles now, not on pre-print servers. And I found a super good one yesterday and, and it's timing for an anti-inflammatory drug to work. And there's a whole bunch to pick from, a whole bunch to pick from. And a lot of 'em are old generics. And you'd go, that stuff used for something totally different. But the secret is timing. And if you don't get the timing right, then it doesn't work me. That out strikes,

Vance Crowe [00:17:35] It strikes me as almost the perfect storm that we created in the sense that we made people so afraid about getting close to other people with coronavirus or going to the hospital with coronavirus because it is so infectious that people are likely, if they're getting it and the barracks start burning down, they're still at home saying like, no, I need to tough this out. It isn't, I don't, I don't wanna go to the hospital.

Temple Grandin [00:17:59] You start to get, see the problem I think is, is that by the time you go to the hospital, you may barely can breathe. It may be too late to use the anti-inflammatory drug. And again, I'm gonna do no drug names because I can't because hoarding can get going, things like that. But, but there's a variety of drugs and some of them are cheap generics and they're on the shelf. But the secret is the timing too early. Then you might retard your troops from fighting too late. The base is ruined, your lungs are wrecked, then the, then other organs get wrecked and your and your bed timing is the key. And what tends to happen is seven to 10 days you feel like terrible. And then sometimes these people feel a bit better and then your soldiers go berserk and they're dead. The next day it's seven to 10 days in and you get the timing right. That's when you throw the drugs at it. Not or not after.

Vance Crowe [00:19:02] From your perspective, do you think that a vaccine is more likely or do you think it is that we will figure out how to treat this with drugs, that once people get sick we know how to treat them and so the cytokine storm doesn't kill quite as many

Temple Grandin [00:19:15] People? Well I think need a combination of both. Is a vaccine's gonna take some time to do? I mean let's say they have one tested by September. Well then they'd give it to the health work care workers, then a hopeless older seniors will get, get it. But that's gonna take time. I'm a little upset that if people aren't doing enough work on saying, what can I find that's cheap on the pharmacy shelf? I'm looking at it like an engineering problem. I know there's drugs on the pharmacy shelf and I've looked 'em up and, and and you look at it, you go that stuff, you gotta be kidding. And it's some for common, generic for common use and, but okay, you know you've got the, you know, I, when you, I post it like an engineer, okay, and now I know this timing thing. Alright, I wanna use a cheap drug, easy to manufacture around the world and then figure out a simple way how to do the timing. Think simple as a tendency to think too complicated. But if they're too far gone, it won't work. And if it's too early it's, it's not good.

Vance Crowe [00:20:21] So we started talking about conveyor belts and timing and one of the big challenges with this coronavirus is that the timing of the entire factory system is set up on having workers spaced a certain amount of space apart, having a certain number of workers. And if all a sudden those things get changed, all of a sudden your labor is not allowed to be as close together as they were. Now these factories don't work how serious of this?

Temple Grandin [00:20:47] No, they, they'll still work.

Vance Crowe [00:20:48] Okay. It

Temple Grandin [00:20:49] Just reduced capacity.

Vance Crowe [00:20:50] Okay.

Temple Grandin [00:20:51] Okay. Like I was just looking at a picture the other day of, of the, one of the news groups had of inside a big meat fab. And I was thinking about, yeah I take some people out of it, the plant will still run, it's just gonna run slower. It just reduces the capacity. It doesn't turn it off. Let's add half the people in there. I can still run the plant. It's just gonna run a whole lot slower.

Vance Crowe [00:21:12] People are sending me photos where in the grocery store the meat is much lower. Is this a real problem or is this just hype? Is this just people saw something?

Temple Grandin [00:21:21] No, there's some problems and, and one of the problems is, okay, the pigs are growing, pigs are growing and then when they're ready they gotta go. And there's been some really bad problems. They just had to euthanize some pigs and throw 'em away because they didn't have enough plant space. This brings up another thing about supply chains. Alright, let's look at it. Almost like nodes on a network. You can look at like data centers on a network or so you know, for electronically. And when I first started in the industry in the seventies, like in my state of Arizona, for example, in the seventies we had two big plants. We had swift and cut A and then we had four, well we called medium sized. Now the Swift plant back in the seventies did 1200 cattle a day and its medium sized plant maybe did 400 a day, three 50 a day. But about a third of our capacity was medium sized plants. So let's say swift went completely down, I would still have, you know, we over half my capacity now Swift just, it slowed down. I, you know, maybe I'd only lose 10, 10% of my capacity. See it's a more distributed supply chain now. But let's just say I have three plants in a network. I'll lose an entire plant 'cause they gotta close at the clean it. Then I'd lose a third of my supply. Okay, then I ran, then I turn the plant back on, it runs slow. Maybe I'm losing, you know, a, a fourth of my supply. You see when you have a see the thing about a concentrated network, it's efficient.

Temple Grandin [00:22:54] It's efficient, very cost efficient. Now as when it comes to animal welfare, big plants, you do a good job on that. I've worked with 'em. Big is not bad. I wanna be very clear, big is not bad. Big's fragile. There's a big difference. Like just the other day here in the state of Colorado, the internet went down, the whole internet went down for 10 minutes. I was on a conference call with my student thesis committee and I'm going, oh man, what's wrong with my router? And I was, you know, pulling out the thing for rebooting the router. And then my student said, well I'm down too. So then I didn't mess with the router, I don't like to do that. And, and it went back on. And then I was talking to another person I know and it was off at her house. That was even further away. Then I talked to a lady in Denver and hers had been down and that's 50 miles from where I live. Live.

Vance Crowe [00:23:46] So, you know, there's something to be really said for big is for big is because it has allowed Americans to have access to beef on a level that is amazing. That's the thing. Like we've been able to be at the top of the food chain.

Temple Grandin [00:23:58] This is the thing big, big can be very good. We set up big plant upright, they work really well. You can put really clean product out. We can have super good animal welfare and these big gigantic plants, but it's a more con but the, but it's not a robust supply chain. You break a node on the system and you see when the internet first started, it was totally distributed. Well now I don't think things are as distributed. I mean we just lost a big pile of internet completely down for 10 minutes. I was freaking out that highest.

Vance Crowe [00:24:32] So what do you think is the answer? What do you think is the answer out of this? Because right now we do have a system where there's a lot of several big packers and very few medium to small. Do we get through this crisis just trying to keep them running at their capacity? Or do we need to make bigger changes? Well,

Temple Grandin [00:24:50] To run the plant slowly, the, the thing that's been the worst thing is they've had to kill pigs and throw them away. That's the worst thing. Absolutely the worst thing. Now the little, 'cause we only have real big plants. We don't have very many what we used to call medium sized plants. Then we have little tiny locker plants. Like someone who raises a pig in their backyard. Well there's no way they can take them, but that's cattle is easier to put 'em on hay and stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:25:18] Have you ever seen the euthanization of pigs on this scale before? Is this unprecedented?

Temple Grandin [00:25:23] It's never happened before. Never happened before. I've been in the industry for 47 years. This is the first time this has happened. And the other thing you've gotta look at when you have a network with large nodes on it for anything, not just me, power, electric power in Canada, they had a ice storm that took out hundreds of the big Eiffel Tower electric transmission towers. The other thing about a big note on a network, whether it's a warehouse for dry goods, okay, what's dry goods? Dry goods is an old fashioned term, but everything you buy in a store that's not refrigerated basically or wet, you know, that's gonna be electronics, clothes, everything else. Dry goods warehouse. I probably have a hard time running out on a generator. They don't have the people packed in it the same way a packing plant does. The infection rates in the large dry goods warehouses, that's been, that's been way lower. But what's happening now, the thing that may happen now we got plants, half the people are infected, are they gonna get herd immunity? That's the $50 million question. And it takes a lot of people to where you have to have a huge amount of people they said is cutting the meat up.

Vance Crowe [00:26:44] Are you concerned about meat shortages?

Temple Grandin [00:26:47] It's a, it, it's a shortage. It's gonna be a shortage in the, in the, in the short term. But what it's showing is I don't care if it's internet or it's meat. When you concentrate a network into a few large nodes, you make that network efficient, real low cost but fragile. You distribute the network, it's more expensive. But when some something breaks, it's more robust and it's a trade off. And that's, and and it, and I don't think it's just meat now there's a lot of other stuff. Let's take chips for example. I've looked at that. What goes inside your phone? What goes inside this computer? There's only like, there's like one place that makes the best ones. There's only a few factories that make the heart of everything electronic. It's the same thing. Let's not just go after the meat industry. Big efficient can do really good product whether it's ships or whether it's meat, but it's fragile

Vance Crowe [00:28:01] Course.

Temple Grandin [00:28:01] Okay, let's talk about generic drug supply chains. Oh this gets even worse because I've looked into that. Common generic drugs, antibiotics, blood pressure pills, you know, just common stuff. You've got a few plants in China that make the raw materials, then they ship 'em to India to actually manufacture the pills. Now they do stockpile a few months of the raw materials. Now you can't stockpile pigs but you can stockpile the raw materials. What happens to the, what do we do about antibiotics if we lose that supply chain? It's very efficient but fragile so long. Don't just pick meat out for this.

Vance Crowe [00:28:42] Oh that's very interesting because meat is the only one that I, as far as I can tell that's really being focused on. It's the one that I'm super interested in. You can see,

Temple Grandin [00:28:52] But the heart of this computer, the heart of your phone comes from a very, very narrow supply chain. You get sick, you need some antibiotics. It's coming from a very concentrated supply chain. You haven't seen it 'cause it hasn't busted yet.

Vance Crowe [00:29:13] So I've seen you speak at nami, the North American Meat Institute. And there they are trying to come up with what are the ways that we can create rules and guidelines that make it so the animals are safe, that the food line is safe. When you do that, when you add on rules, and I'm just using the meat industry 'cause it's the one that we both share and understanding of. You can create rules that make it so things are safer or cleaner. But when you start asking the locker, which only processes a few pigs a day or the medium sized meat plant to li abide by the, the standards that you have in these huge systems, it they would make the case that it's onerous, that it's too much for them to be able to do. Which is why you have to have economies of scale because of the regulation. Is that a fair

Temple Grandin [00:30:03] Well regulation regulation is not why you have economies of scale.

Vance Crowe [00:30:06] Okay,

Temple Grandin [00:30:07] Let's think electric power, water labor. It, it's, it's more on that. Okay. Now

Vance Crowe [00:30:15] The

Temple Grandin [00:30:15] Interesting thing on the regulations thing is we've been able to take the rules that I've made and apply 'em to locker plants and not make 'em go broke. Because what I've done is I don't tell 'em exactly what equipment they have to have. We use five simple outcome measures. Like okay, we're using captive bolt stunning and it's gotta make the cattle unconscious of a single shot. And, and on NAMI right now, if it's below 96%, somebody's gonna get kicked off the McDonald's approved supplier list. And the biggest problem we had with that was broken equipment. That's not making 'em buy stuff. Take care of the stuff you've got. And, and then we do vocalization scoring a handling scoring. If they're out there slamming doors on cattle and poking 'em with electric prods, they're gonna start mooing and that needs to be under 5%.

Vance Crowe [00:31:03] Wait so you can monitor the sound of cows to know how healthy they're

Temple Grandin [00:31:08] I can, whether they are handled right, not health handled. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:31:13] Wow.

Temple Grandin [00:31:14] Be well because you got, let's say you got a 20 or 30% vocalization score and I go out to the, the cattle handling area and they're out there slamming gates on 'em or they're out there just zapping 'em all the time with electric prods, cattle block at the silliest little things like if you have a, let's say that a paper towel just moving like this, hanging out of a dispenser, you'll about shut the plant down. I've gone in and taken a paper towel out, then the prod score went from like 30% down to about 10%. And all I did was get rid of a paper towel. You'll just block at the littlest, stupidest things. So we measured the stunning score. Everything had to be dead. When you hang out on the rail, vocalization score falling down, that's usually due to rough handling or slippery floors and electric produce, five measures. And, and when we were working on this back in 1999 when I was training the McDonald's and the Wendy's people, one thing I'm very proud of, we went into some older plants that were not very pretty and kind of shabby and we got good scores. And we've done the same thing with locker plants doing simple things like non-slip flooring in the stunning area. That's a simple thing. Non-slip flooring in the unloading ramp, changing lighting. Animals don't like to go in the dark. So I duct taped the light on the entrance of the chute and then they went in, put a wall up so they don't see people walking by. Simple stuff like this airflow direction, simple stuff to fix.

Temple Grandin [00:32:46] And we made, I'm very proud of that. 75 McDonald's suppliers, only three had to build something expensive.

Vance Crowe [00:32:55] You know, you have an amazing ability. It's what really sets you apart to be able to, as you described it, see as the animals see it. But you're also a teacher. So have you been able to teach others to see the world through the eyes of an animal the way that you are able to see it? Well,

Temple Grandin [00:33:15] When I first started in the seventies, I didn't, I thought everybody was a visual thinker. I didn't realize, I thought differently. And, and I, I find that some people I can teach other people, I have to just have to give them checklists where they can go in and they just use a checklist to, to look for the different things. But I've went into a plant, here's one that was really cool. It was over in Ireland and we get off the Dublin airport, we get out and we get this really so bad cool executive black helicopter, you want coal? And we, this is all, and this is only like three years ago, this is relatively recent. And we land on the front lawn of his beef plant and we'd go in there and the cattle wouldn't go in the stun box. And I go up there and there was some holes in the door about this big, the cattle could see some motion through it. And we covered them with duct tape and it worked. And then we flew away. That was three years ago. And people kind of go, oh, why didn't I see that? That's all we did. That was three years ago, I guess. I got job security.

Vance Crowe [00:34:28] Are I, so I, I've gotten to meet one of your assistants, Lily, I think is her name.

Temple Grandin [00:34:33] Yes. Yeah. Lily Callaway Edwards.

Vance Crowe [00:34:35] And so she is very eloquent, speaks but her social skills are very different than yours.

Temple Grandin [00:34:41] No, she's a good social skills.

Vance Crowe [00:34:43] Yeah. And so that's what I'm, I'm wondering, so would, was she a visual thinker like you? I don't wanna talk about another person, but I I'm very impressed with her and yet she's very different from you. So how did she get the capacity to work as closely as she is with you?

Temple Grandin [00:34:58] Well, she went, she was hired by a meat company and she went around all the, their plants. And then I visited the plants after she had been there. And I saw the things that she did and there were the same things that I did. And you see you can teach it, you know, you can teach it. And the thing that's interesting is you can go into a place and you fix a whole lot of little things and it adds up to a big thing. I'll give you an example. I went in an older plant on, they did dairy cows there. Well the first mistake they made is they were bringing too many cattle up at a time. So I stopped that. Okay. I first work on the handling, I got the electric prods out of their hands. Okay, now they still were blocking, it wouldn't go into the single file chute. And there was a sunbeam coming in and we blocked that with a tarp. Then they could see a person who was checking the cattle IDs. We put a big piece of cardboard up in front of her. Okay. That fixed that part of it. Then coming around up, up to the, up to the restrainer area, they wouldn't go in. I taped the light on the restrainer and then people were walking by in front of it. We hung a curtain up and we did all those things. And these were simple things. There was a big improvement in the handling. And each time we fixed one of these things, it got better. And these were not expensive things. It was an old shabby facility. And, and a whole lot of little things add up to a big thing too often people wanna do the big thing. Oh let's just tear it all out. No, no, wait a minute. And I, I've gone into places that had brand new equipment.

Temple Grandin [00:36:29] I remember going into one place, they'll run in their conveyors too fast. They thought it would speed. Oh, I said slow it down, slow it down, this is terrible. And then they had a gate that went like that and I fixed that. And then I put a light on the restrain entrance. And there's a tendency to wanna do the big thing where sometimes it's a whole lot of little things you need to do.

Vance Crowe [00:36:51] Your way of viewing the world allows you to connect with animals. But I would also think that because you see the world so differently, connecting with just regular people would be a different experience for you. What is, what has it been like for you to talk with people that view the world so differently than you?

Temple Grandin [00:37:09] The first step is realizing that people think differently. That's the first step. And then you can learn how to work with them. Like all the stuff. Now with coronavirus, I'm disgusted that they haven't done a better job on repurposing old drugs for the anti-inflammatory. And people are too busy fighting. I call it cycle drama than they are in solving problems. I used years ago, I used to say engineering's easy. It's the people problems that are hard.

Vance Crowe [00:37:37] So you have written several books, one of which was Animals Make us Human.

Temple Grandin [00:37:44] Yes. And

Vance Crowe [00:37:44] It talks about people having pets. What is something about pet ownership that most people have not observed even though they've maybe owned a dog for, for many years?

Temple Grandin [00:37:56] Well, a lot of people get companionship from pets. I don't really understand what you're asking.

Vance Crowe [00:38:00] Well, I'm saying like one of the things, if you have observed all of these things about cows and the way they walk through shoots, but you also can see dogs and the way that they interact with their humans. I think people, I, I know myself included probably misinterpret what my dog is trying to tell me quite a bit of the time. Well

Temple Grandin [00:38:17] First of, I'm just of all dogs and other animals have certain instinctual behaviors. Like the dog will do the play bow or it puts its butt up in the air. That's a play bow. Okay. It lifts up the the lip and hackles. Yeah, definitely not want wanting to play. Those are what are called species. That's the species typical for the dog. That's like hardwired in. Now. One thing where people and dogs get confused, seeing people hugging around, here's all lovey dovey in dogs, it's dominance. And if you go online and you type in the, into Google images, children, hugging dogs, you'll see the dog with a mouth kind of just clamped shut and the kid's hugging it around the shoulders. It's tolerating it, but it doesn't really like it. This is where our species for lovey-dovey is different than theirs. You know, just stroke your dog. He's gonna really like that. And also don't pat your dog like that. Stroke him. Stroke him. Another thing is just to get people to look at what, what's their dog interested in. And I see dogs out for walks on the big tape measure leashes. And they've never had it so good now during COVID and the dog wants to go sniff the tree and he just, he's yanked away. And I said, well he's checking out his p you know, let him, you know, let him do that. And and I've had people write to me and say, well after reading my, after reading one of my books, either Animals in translation, animals make us Human. That now they started looking at what their, their pet was interested in. And I'm worried a lot of dogs don't have a good social life. You rear any animal alone where it doesn't learn when it's young, how to interact other animals, they'll be nasty fighters.

Temple Grandin [00:39:51] They'll fight other animals. I've seen dogs do it. Horses do it. Cattle even do it really bad.

Vance Crowe [00:39:57] Yeah, we were very fortunate when we, when we got our new dog, we had a greyhound and she was getting older. But it was good to have the two dogs around each other because the older dog taught the newer dog exactly how we behave and what's going on. That's and how things work.

Temple Grandin [00:40:11] But if an animal, but if an animal doesn't get that social training when it's young, where it doesn't learn the give and take of social relations, okay, well one will be dominant. I'll never forget when I, when I bought some property, it came with a big black horse on it. Very friendly to people. Any other horse you put on a 20 acre pasture, Blackie try to co totally go after him. Like back him into the corner and just kick him to death. And he'd been rear alone. Like we had, I had to tell him, you know, you can't border me here. He's, he's too nasty towards other horses and, and young animals need to learn social skills from older experienced animals.

Vance Crowe [00:40:52] Did you see how during coronavirus all of the pet shelters have been emptied out? Like they're, they're yes. A huge amount of adoption that's gone on.

Temple Grandin [00:41:01] Well it's well being home. Another thing I get asked all the time in the autism community, you've got family with an autistic kid that's not at school, what are we gonna do? And I suggest establish a new schedule. I make myself get up in the morning, take a shower, be dressed for work by eight, make a new routine. And then I suggest that they look up life on the International Space Station. Not all the spacewalk stuff, but you know, tight sleeping quarters that you can get a tour of the toilet that doesn't look too much like very much fun. But you're talking about people living in tight quarters. And one thing NASA's learned is they have a schedule. They make 'em get up in the morning, get dressed, they have to do their station maintenance, they've got to do their experiments, then they have midday meal, everybody eats together. Important part of the schedule. Then they have alone time, then they have their exercise time 'cause they've gotta exercise two hours a day. But making a a a schedule. Another thing that some parents are doing during this time is a good time to teach a kid life skills. Cooking, sewing, building things to be a good time to teach those skills. Because lots of times I'm seeing smart, fully verbal autistic kids that'll all be doing a skilled trade that aren't learning things like shopping. And when I was out in construction all the time, like in the eighties and the nineties, I was living on the road staying in little strip motels. That's before you had Holiday Inn expresses living in little hotels with the construction workers. I'm gonna estimate that 20% of the skilled drafting designers I worked with engineers and skilled trades welders I worked with building my projects were either autistic, dyslexic or A DHD.

Temple Grandin [00:42:46] I went, I went through my projects and I listed about five people I know are undiagnosed autistic. One guy has 20 patents. Now the thing that concerns me is what's happening to the junior edition of those kids today. They don't get a chance to do skilled trades. People don't think to take the little math geniuses and expose 'em to programming, expose 'em to, if the kid's bored with baby third grade math, let 'em do high school math and you can just do it online. People don't think to do this moving my head. But we're losing skills. And I didn't realize how serious it was until I went to the poultry plant. That was all the specialized equipment came over in a hundred shipping containers, one shipping container per semi. That's a hundred semi loads of really beautiful equipment from Europe.

Vance Crowe [00:43:39] Yeah, I'm struck that our culture probably the same thing that you were describing about that the big, when you make these things big, they're efficient is probably true also with students. You know, if you need something that's specialized for kids that are thinking about the world differently, yes you can get a lot of kids through a standardized system, but if you don't pick out those kids that think differently and give them a different way of learning or a different way to absorb the material, you're, you're missing out on that opportunity to leverage the different mind.

Temple Grandin [00:44:15] Well the problem is we have a real shortage of skilled trades and 25 years ago they took, you know, welding shop and auto shop and stuff like that outta the schools home, air selling, cooking all that stuff outta the schools. And, and kids aren't even getting exposed to that to see that. That's a career. But, but I'm very concerned about, about skill shortages and, and kids get interested in things they get exposed to. I get asked how did I come, how, how could I be a person from outside of Boston and get interested in the cattle industry? I had no background in it. I was exposed to it when I was a teenager. Springs up a really important thing. Students get interested in things they get exposed to. While I'm very concerned about the losing skills and again on the narrow supply chains, what's inside your phone and makes it work is on a very tight supply chain that's tighter than meat is. And generic drugs that supply chain is even more concentrated than meat plants are.

Vance Crowe [00:45:11] Yeah. And it seems to me that the kids that are right now in Silicon Valley, if you're an autistic person, the chances are if you're being asked to interact with the social norms of just regular people, you're gonna have crossways. Right. So you had the issues of like that kid James Damore, are you familiar with him?

Temple Grandin [00:45:31] No. What did he do?

Vance Crowe [00:45:33] So there was a, an engineer at Google and he made some observations about the way that they were working together in teams that he was making just the observations based on data. But apparently this offended a lot of people that he was making observations that people behave differently, men behave differently than women. Some women behave one way. And then I think, I

Temple Grandin [00:45:52] Think I know who you're talking about and I've read that book on the coders. I've been to Silicon Valley, I've been to most of the big tech companies. I've been half those programmers are on the spectrum and they actually avoid the labels. Those kids go to Montessori schools, they get introduced to programming early. And one thing I'm concerned about right now, 'cause we do have a shortage of coders. Let's say I have a little math genius in third grade, they're so hung up on the autism. They don't think to teach the kids some JavaScript. That's what makes Minecraft work. They don't think that. And, and you can find that stuff online for free code.org Cotton Academy. I tell parents about this kind of stuff all the time. Oh, and if you wanna really turn on the math, kids look up protein symmetry on Google images, protein

Vance Crowe [00:46:41] Symmetry, what will we find?

Temple Grandin [00:46:42] You'll find beautiful geometric patterns and they're inside your body and that, and you start looking up a lot of things. Okay, viruses, they have beautiful geometric patterns too. They look like art. Well take a, I can take a third grade math kids start showing him that stuff. He's going to find out how those patterns work. But people don't think to show the kid this stuff, they get so much in the autism box. They don't think about developing a math skill. But the other thing you gotta do is you gotta take that thing that fixated on when I was a little kid, mother took my drawing skill and really worked on broadening it. And instead of just drawing the same horse head over and over again, she got me drawing the whole horse draw, saddle draw. You know, you broaden that skill and develop it. And you know, there's a lot of famous people that were probably autistic. Einstein didn't talk until age three.

Vance Crowe [00:47:39] Oh really?

Temple Grandin [00:47:40] No. Didn't talk until age three. Where would he be today? This is the problem. And there's famous mathematicians that probably were, you know, on the autism spectrum.

Vance Crowe [00:47:50] So you've been to, to, you know, small schools in rural America. If you were a parent of an autistic child in a place without very many resources, how would you be recommending those people prepare their kids? I mean you mentioned Khan Academy and some of these things online.

Temple Grandin [00:48:06] Well one of the problems you got, let's say you got a single mom who's working, well now you've got a single mom that's home and she doesn't have a paycheck. You know, we've got some really serious problems here. But one of the big mistakes they made in the schools is taking out, okay, theater, art, sewing, woodworking, auto shop welding. Because I know a person and he owns a metal fabrication company and a big metal fabrication company and he sells stuff all around the world. And he was dyslexic. A DHD. He's real autistic, acting horrible student. Took welding in high school, started making stuff and selling it. Owns a big metal fabrication company. You see this is the sort of stuff as I go back and forth between the autism world and the, and the, you know, and just, well we gotta work on building some stuff now. I'm probably gonna be going out to shop outside of Greeley real soon. We gotta work on building some stuff. The, the autistic brain gives us a tech that we are talking on right now. It's made by the autistic brain. You see a little bit of autism, you take out some social, then you get more thinking. Then you get all the way on the other end of the spectrum. You get somebody who can't talk and they can't trust themselves. See the big problem is he's got the same name now here's a mindblower of a paper. It's called genomic trade-offs or autism and schizophrenia. The steep price for a human brain. The same genes that make the brain big.

Temple Grandin [00:49:38] Cause autism and schizophrenia, it's embedded. It's tons of little code changes. Part of it's just normal variation. We get rid of all the autism. James, you better like the electronics you have because you won't be getting anymore.

Vance Crowe [00:49:52] Do you think autism is increasing in prevalence or is it just being better understood? What do you think is going on there? I

Temple Grandin [00:49:59] Think some of it is increased detection. I go, they haven't been going to many autism meetings now because every, all of nobody's traveling. All the corporations have travel bans. Everything's grounded. But when I was going to autism meetings, like before March 12th, I'd have a lot of grandparents come up to me. And when the kids got diagnosed, they would discover that they were autistic and they had decent jobs. And that's because in our generation, kids were taught working skills. They had paper routes. Also social skills were taught in a much more concrete way. You were taught to shake hands, taught to say please and thank you. If I stirred my drink with my finger. And mother would say, use the spoon. There was much more. So things being taught now where one of these older grandparents could benefit from a diagnosis is on their relationships. Their marriage is a mess. That's where the diagnosis can be helpful. But on the work front, there's a lot of kids. I, I look at this kid and I go, you're just normal. You know, computer geek kind of kid that ought to work in Silicon Valley. And the other thing then when we, when you know they try to go to voc rehab, they don't differentiate between where bagging groceries is a suitable career and where maybe it's training job, they're not making that differentiation. Also, there's too much emphasis on doing an interview. When I tell people, half of all good jobs, people go in the back door. I was out at a major tech company and I talked to a kid that had a really cool job.

Temple Grandin [00:51:34] I said, and you're from Wisconsin. How'd you get this job? His professor knew somebody that's the back door. And parents don't think they're like, oh there's a little florist shop over there or some other kind of little shop. Maybe their kid could work there in the summer. You know, the people that run the shop just using resources that are in the neighborhood.

Vance Crowe [00:52:00] Yeah, I mean work is one of those things that if you don't do it as a kid, you don't realize how many skills you're picking up. Even if it's not like I had a construction job. Okay. The value of that was not me learning how to swing a hammer, although that was valuable. It was learning how to ask for more work. It was learning how to take on responsibilities, how to be a good member of that team. It was figuring out what could I build my skills in? And

Temple Grandin [00:52:25] What,

Vance Crowe [00:52:25] And it seems to me there are not a lot of kids working these days. And I don't know that that's their choice.

Temple Grandin [00:52:30] Well you see, but this is the problem. You know, I tell parents chores for little kids now we don't have paper routes anymore, but we need to find something to substitute for that. Now unfortunately, all the churches and community centers now are closed because those were perfect places for volunteer jobs where the kids doing a task on a schedule outside the family. It's really important. And I see a lot of moms that can't let go. They kind of gotten their identity tied up and being a special needs mom. And when I suggested their kids should go in the store and buy something, the mom says she can't let go. And, and the kid's a 16-year-old honors student and he's never gone in the store bought, well they're not learning money. Like in my generation, I got 50 cents a week for allowance and I could buy five comics with that. But if I wanted a 69 cent airplane, I had to save for two weeks. I was learning that when I was seven and eight years old.

Vance Crowe [00:53:26] Yeah, absolutely.

Temple Grandin [00:53:27] You learn the meaning of money.

Vance Crowe [00:53:30] I remember the kids that would get the job to mow the lawn at the church and the, the, at first it seemed like a really sweet deal 'cause you made a bunch more money than you did for, for doing other chores. But then it turns out, if you skip on Saturday, every single person in our church would know that you didn't mow and look at it outside. And you need that, like, that kind of social pressure helps you.

Temple Grandin [00:53:55] But that's the, but that's the thing. And we need to be doing more of those opportunities. And since he said the church, everybody knows, oh, the kid didn't mow the lawn, you know, that week you see this is I, and we need to be looking more for just opportunities in the neighborhood. But what's been happening with me, I go back and forth between, I'll do an autism meeting, you know, then I'll go to the nami, like the meat conference, you know, then I'm, right now nobody's going to the meat plants. But, but going back and forth between world of mechanical things, animal things, I'll do a talk at a university and a jumping, I call that jumping between the silos. But what happens that a lot of these kids that get diagnosed with autism and that becomes a primary identity. We're not in Silicon Valley, the primary identity's a computer programmer, but then they don't see the math ability and going, well we ought just move this kid ahead. Let's get him on, let's see if he can write JavaScript. And then they've got to learn. Yeah, they gotta write JavaScript for something somebody else wants.

Vance Crowe [00:54:59] That's right. That's right.

Temple Grandin [00:55:01] Something, an assignment for something somebody else wants.

Vance Crowe [00:55:06] And every adult can appreciate this because when you're left to your own, like you were saying, you need to set a schedule and that's good for an autistic child, but that's good for everyone, right? Like getting into these patterns and having expectations where somebody else is going to evaluate your work. Did you meet what they need? That's right. That, that is good. It's, it's also good for the soul, right? It's the thing that makes you feel progress. It allows you to evaluate to figure out if you're getting better. These are, these are all valuable things,

Temple Grandin [00:55:36] But I think that, you know, the certain amount of autism's always been here, but when little, when kids are really small and they're like two years old, I mean I look really severe at two years old. Fortunately I got a lot of really good early therapy. And then you work with the little kids, work on getting them talking. You can pull some of them, you know, get the speech going. But what I'm seeing now is I'm seeing smart kids now that are just quirky and different. One kid's going to the basement to play video games on a disability check and the other go goes out there and gets a job. And that's what I'm seeing. I've also had parents tell me they get their kid out and expose 'em to more stuff. They'll say blossomed. You see, you gotta see an autistic person is a bottom up thinker. You gotta fill the database with lots and lots, lots of information. And, and then they've looked at more things. You gotta stretch 'em. There's a tendency, overprotect give 'em choices. When I was 15, I was afraid to go to my aunt's ranch. Mother gave me a choice. I could go all summer or I could go for a week. Not going, wasn't one of the choices. And I got out to the ranch and I loved it. And kids are often afraid to try new things, you know, but give 'em some choices of new things to try. I went to a meeting last year in Nebraska. They had a really nice summer camp for kids. And the mom would say, you got my kid on a boat. You gotta be kidding. Yeah. They got him on a boat and he loved it. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I like to hear.

Vance Crowe [00:57:08] I worked at a camp for inner city kids that once the camp was done for the summer, then people could rent out the camp for a week at a time. And I remember there was a school for blind children and they wanted to take kids out in the canoe. And I was one of the lifeguards. Yeah. And at the time I was like really upset about this. 'cause I was like, what happens if they fall in da da da? Well, and ultimately the person, well

Temple Grandin [00:57:31] Fine.

Vance Crowe [00:57:32] What's that?

Temple Grandin [00:57:33] As long as they can swim, they do have to know how to swim. And

Vance Crowe [00:57:36] That's what the person told me, like, we're gonna do the swim test just like everybody else. But the more that we keep these kids out of the water, the less safe they are. And it really struck me that that was That's right. The person willing to allow that child to experience something that's got a little bit of danger, but you've got guardrails around them allows them to blossom, like you were saying, well

Temple Grandin [00:57:56] That's just it. And, and they've gotta get out and do things. The other thing I've noticed, 'cause I've done a lot of corporate talks too on, you know, diversity and I talk about the different kinds of minds is I've seen a tendency sometimes in a large corporation, and these are not meat companies and they're not tech companies, so they're regular consumer product companies, you know, keep their names out of it, but a tendency for the disability community to almost build a silo inside the corporation. And that's not good. I remember one company, big brand name company, and I gave my talk, they invited everybody to come. And then when it was time to meet with the managers, most companies will get the regular human resources person to come in and meet with me. No, this company, they, the disability, I just met with the disability people, I don't, it, it, it, it's making a silo inside that, that corporation that's not good. Another thing I've found on really progressive stuff in corporations, whether I don't care if it's innovation, whether it's hiring people that are different, there has to be a champion inside that corporation that pushes it forward.

Vance Crowe [00:59:07] Yeah. I mean, and I think that it's inside a corporations, they want things to be as standardized and as normalized as possible. And so you have to find somebody that's like, yes, this is not gonna fit the ordinary pattern. But the value out of this is we may bring in somebody that can help us think through a problem in a way that we wouldn't have. And it's hard because you, those dividends may not pay off right away. You've gotta have somebody that's built up enough. That's

Temple Grandin [00:59:30] Problem. We've had too much of next quarter's profit statement. We've had too much of that. That's been part of the problem.

Vance Crowe [00:59:41] So after you and I scheduled this interview, I was watching one of my favorite podcasts, which is probably the largest podcast in the world right now called the Joe Rogan Experience. And your name got brought up on this podcast as somebody that helped a chef figure out how amazing our food system was. And I'm, I am often struck by how many people know who you are. Temple. You know, the, the fact that people, when they heard that you were coming on this podcast or you're being spoken about on the largest podcast in the world, what was it like to go from a person that was being in motels and helping build slaughterhouses to now being one of the most well-known names in, in the world as far as animal treatment and autism?

Temple Grandin [01:00:32] I feel it's responsibility. And right now I really work hard on with my students. I have a lot of my students that are out in the meat industry. They're doing some really good things out there. Lily's one of my students, we talked about Lily, Lily Callaway Edwards, she's now an assistant professor at Colorado State University. I have people walked up to me in the airport and they'd say, well how do you like all this attention? I said, it's a responsibility and I've got to try to think about things in a real level, headed, sensible way. Now, of course, one of the reasons why I was looking up so much stuff on repurposing old drugs for cytokine storms is I'm at risk. I'd like to save my butt.

Vance Crowe [01:01:11] I now have, I

Temple Grandin [01:01:12] Now I have a pile of abstract, I, I print the first page of an article out and then I write notes on it. I don't print all paper out. I now have a pile of the first page of journal article that thick. Right now I have been deep in the literature and I think I do know how to save my butt, but I'm not gonna mention any drug names because people go, Bayer will only talk about the principles.

Vance Crowe [01:01:34] So one of the questions that I've tried to ask everybody as Coronavirus has gone on is what do you think the world will look like in two weeks?

Temple Grandin [01:01:44] Probably pretty much the same. You know, the thing we need to be looking at is this herd immunity thing. We now have a meat packing plants that are half infected now all the people there and a prison that's almost a hundred percent infected will the, he will the will the herd immunity start, start to make it stop. That's not gonna happen in two weeks. But that's something we need to look at. A vaccine's the ultimate solution and I'll be one of the first ones to line up for the vaccine. And then the other thing is repurposing these old drugs. But what I learned is this timing thing, we've got to figure out a very simple way to do the timing. And there's a blood test, again, I'm not gonna name it, there's a blood test that I think will work for that. But the problem is, is that you could miss the timing messing around trying to get the blood test. So now I wanna think of something even simpler. Like okay, seven to 10 days in now you start to feel better. Then all of a sudden you're super sick. And that may be the simple way to know the cytokine storm is just starting and you better hit it with something. Which one do you pick off the pharmacy shelf? That's the $50 million question. So

Vance Crowe [01:02:51] I think in, in times of crisis, right, you can see it as also an opportunity to make some changes in the world. Kind of the Overton window of what are acceptable ideas gets opened up and new ideas have the possibility of coming in as we're reshaping society because we're restarting things. What are some ideas that were used to be considered radical or unthinkable that you think we really ought to try and inject back into society in, in order to come out of this ahead?

Temple Grandin [01:03:20] Well of course one of the things, and I look at all the convention badges I've collected and I've put 'em on my wall upstairs and I'm going, I ever gonna go to the convention again? We ever gonna use convention centers again the way we use them because they were some major spreaders of the virus international convention and then they get on the airplane 20 years ago I used to call the airplane the great silver vector for disease. And, and because that they'd go to this convention and then fly, fly back home, spread it around. And then with learning, let's just say for business, okay, my industry, the meat industry, the sales department would go out and visit the customers. Every industry did that. Now they're forced to do it online. Are they gonna do less business travel or are people super social And, and it will just come back as soon as they're not worried about getting sick.

Vance Crowe [01:04:14] And what's your intuition?

Temple Grandin [01:04:16] I think a lot of it's gonna come back. I was just looking at some stuff on cell phone data. Okay. It was supposed to be staying home when it got near the end of the time for the lockdown order. There was more cars out away from their homes. Not a huge amount, you know, and I've been pretty careful 'cause I'm in, in the at risk group.

Vance Crowe [01:04:38] Yeah. You and I both do a lot of speaking and my sense is my hope is that people will value the attention that they're giving when they're traveling that much more. Like now it'll be like, hey, if I'm away from home or if I'm intermixing with a whole bunch of strangers, then I'm really gonna pour my whole self into it. As opposed to showing up and really spending most of the time on your computer, in your cell phone and kind of being there.

Temple Grandin [01:05:02] Well the other thing is there's certain things that online's not gonna replace about conventions. Let's just look at my own students. I had it all set up for my dairy graduate student, Cora, to go to an animal welfare meeting to meet two of the top researchers in dairy welfare. And that was canceled. Now I can remember when I was her age, those kind of experiences are really important. I remember going, I was in my twenties going and meeting a scientist named Ron Kilmore and that, and he was like his really great big person in animal behavior. That was an important experience for me for a young student. Doing that online is just not the same. Also, you don't get all the little informal contacts where I, I met somebody in the hall and I sold 'em a job. Just, there's a lot of that stuff you're gonna miss out. You know, I think that maybe what will happen is maybe fewer better done trips. 'cause I've been thinking about do I want to get on back on the road as hard as I was. You know, there's things I think we can do online, but on the other hand, it's not gonna totally replace and it's not gonna replace at the chemistry lab in high school that may get the student turned on to chemistry and go into that career.

Vance Crowe [01:06:19] That's right. And you can't teach welding online and you can't teach plumbing and teach

Temple Grandin [01:06:24] No, this stuff cannot be done online.

Vance Crowe [01:06:29] My sense is that, that we'll end up having this be somewhat like a baptism for most people. That, that you don't have a choice. You either have to stay in your house and, and avoid it at all costs. Or you have to say, I'm going to go out and risk getting it because the, the idea that we would wait for a vaccine seems to me to be too far off in the future. Particularly when people in their thirties are for the most part not not taken down by this.

Temple Grandin [01:06:54] Yeah. And most part, and then a few are killed by the cytokine storm. Right. Probably killed by it. The other problem you've got is if everybody just went out there, the medical system be overwhelmed completely. And the other problem is, is then the young ones bring it back and give it to grand daddy and grandfather. That's the other problem because my risk of dying if I get it, is way higher.

Vance Crowe [01:07:17] That's right.

Temple Grandin [01:07:17] Than you, for example. And, and that's why we need to figure out how to treat this severe COVID and stop this cytokine storm before it kills where your own immune system, instead of defending the base starts to burn up the base.

Vance Crowe [01:07:36] Well Temple, I am so grateful that you were willing to, to take the time to do this. I know we had talked about doing this sometime when you came to visit St. Louis. Next, maybe we'll do one in person, but for now it was a, it was a big honor to be able to sit down and do this.

Temple Grandin [01:07:49] It was really great. And thank you so much for having me and I think we've talked about a lot of interesting things.

Vance Crowe [01:07:58] Yep. Be safe and I'll, I'll see you again soon. Ah.